Thai military seeks Facebook, Google cooperation with censorship

* Junta seeks cooperation filtering content

* Army, regulator, ministry monitoring online 24 hours a day

By Khettiya Jittapong, Manunphattr and Dhanananphorn

BANGKOK, May 29 Thailand's military junta will
send officials to Singapore and Japan in coming days to seek
tighter censorship of social media from Facebook, Google
Inc and instant messenger service Line, a government
spokesman said on Thursday.

The military has sought to stifle criticism as it
consolidates power after toppling an elected government on May
22, detaining politicians and restricting print, radio and
broadcast media.

But authorities have struggled to control activity online,
where users have used social media to organise protests and
express opposition to the coup. The junta has warned about the
spread of what it considers provocative material on social
media, and asked service providers to help tighten censorship.

"We want to talk to them informally," Pisit Pao-In, adviser
to the permanent secretary of the Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) Ministry, told a news conference on Thursday.
"We do not ask them to install any additional software. We just
ask them to help filtering content."

Officials would have to travel as the three companies had no
representatives in Thailand with whom to hold talks, he said,
speaking after a meeting in Bangkok with Internet gateway and
Internet service providers (ISPs).

The ministry asked ISPs to block websites within an hour of
receiving an official request to take them down, said an ISP
source who attended the meeting on Thursday, declining to be
identified because he was not authorised by his company to speak
to media.

After the coup, the ICT established a commission to monitor
websites and block content that flouts military guidelines or
Thailand's strict Lese Majeste laws. There are three monitoring
centres working 24 hours a day: one at the army, the ICT and the
state telecom regulator, Pisit said.

More than 100 web pages have been blocked since the coup, he
added. The ICT, the police, the intelligence agency and
regulator work together to monitor websites, he said.

Thai users were alarmed on Wednesday when the ministry
blocked access to Facebook. It is unclear why the site was
blocked.

The government had no plans to block access to Thailand's 24
million Facebook users, Pisit said.

Norwegian telecoms group Telenor, which owns a controlling
stake in Thailand's second-largest mobile operator, Total Access
Communications, said the outage had lasted 55 minutes.

"Telenor Group believes in open communication and regrets
the consequences this might have had for the people of
Thailand," the company said in a statement.

NATIONAL GATEWAY

The military plans to consolidate the 15 private and
state-run Internet gateways into one single national gateway to
facilitate monitoring.

"We will have a single gateway to monitor inflow and outflow
of content on the Internet... The main reason is for security,"
Pisit told Reuters. He said it was unlikely the gateway would be
completed before the end of the year.

The single gateway would give the government increased
control over access to websites hosted outside Thailand, the ISP
source said.

Thailand has 15 Internet gateway providers and leading
players include two state-owned firms CAT Telecom and TOT Pcl
and private company True Internet, part of True Corp.
(Reporting by Manunphattr Dhanananphorn and Khettiya Jittapong;
Editing by Simon Webb and Ron Popeski)

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